Region benefits from immigrant connections

Orlando Gutierrez is a senior manager at Kroger Co. and co-chair of the Diverse by Design initiative’s team to help keep a diverse range of employees in the region. A native of Colombia, he has lived here for eight years.

My family and I moved here when Chiquita transferred me as expatriate from Panama. After you start to feel like Cincinnati is your home, you’re hungry for connections. My daughter, Ana Maria, finished her marketing degree at the University of Cincinnati; my son, Santiago, enjoys Mason schools and my wife, Patricia, has a lot of friends and community work that connects her to Cincinnati. We wanted to stay close as a family, so we decided to stay here. We think Cincinnati is a great place to live and work. Mason, where we live, has a very international background. When I went to the school for the first time it was like going to the United Nations.

I came here with 20 expats. When we started it was very hard to do the transition, but I was lucky. I had a lot of friends at Procter & Gamble, GE and Accenture. That’s what we’re trying to do with our effort, create connections and develop awareness. Those connections help employees feel more welcome, and they also help companies understand consumers better, help increase innovation and create opportunities. When you bring people of different backgrounds together, they’re often going to create better solutions.

We always say Cincinnati is a great secret because nobody knows about all the opportunities that are out there to connect within the city. If you move to Chicago you’re not going to have the opportunity to have coffee with the mayor or meet with a C-suite executive. And people are starting to recognize the advantages here for entrepreneurs, with the lower cost of living and a good market to test prototypes in.

All the cities we think of as very welcoming to immigrants make these changes over years. They start to see the ways that immigrants can help a city grow and be a better place to live.

I think Cincinnati is working to be more welcoming to immigrants, and we want to help make that happen, because everyone benefits when the region becomes more diverse and continues to grow. ■